The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #153539 Message #3642418
Posted By: Mr Happy
15-Jul-14 - 01:43 PM
Thread Name: Cleckheaton Folk Festival 2014
Subject: RE: Cleckheaton Folk Festival 2014
The festival website said camping fee would be £6 per person per night.
One of my friends emailed the fest organisers to check out if we could just pay for camping as we never attend concerts, instead playing & singing in the fringe events in the local pub sessions.
The emailed response from the organisers confirmed that this would be ok.
I printed a copy of the email to show to stewards etc
On arriving at the campsite, we were shocked & very disappointed to be asked to pay £12 per person per night.
Had I known that the cost would be this high, I'd never have attended in the first place.
Turning to the pub sessions, we had one reasonable one in the House at Home pub on Sat afternoon along with some friends from Acoustic Collective but towards the later afternoon, many locals drank too much & became very noisy.
Vacating there, after an evening meal, we moved on to the Commercial where the musicians diddley session was in full & melodious swing in one of the back rooms.
The front room was unoccupied & quiet, so we set up a music & song sesh in there.
After about an hour, some other folk came, as we thought, to join our session – but no.
Two very loud players proceeded to work their way through a songbook totally oblivious of turn-taking, common good manners, session etiquette as might be reasonably expected anywhere all lacking.
They seemed to have brought all their acolytes with them, including other singers & musicians, who appeared to accept & expect the 2 raucous 'leaders' to perform all the songs while the rest meekly followed along.
I/we not accustomed to that kind of ill-mannered boorishness but apparently others liked it so voting with our feet, we'll never go there again